What's a best practice for having the heading of a new chapter positioned, say 3" from the top of the page but the rest of the chapter's pages maintain a 1.25" top margin? It seems cheesy just to put a couple of line breaks in.

Putting in more than one carriage return is "cheesy", I guess, but Nisus does require you to put at least one. I would use a special empty paragraph with a style (called "Spacer" or something like that) that has a very small line height setting. Then I would set the "space before" appropriately on the Chapter Heading style.

Yes, I regard line breaks as paragraph delimiters, not as blank space formatters per se. I avoid multiple contiguous paragraph returns as much as possible.

In the present situation, it is not necessary to have an empty paragraph above the header text in order to achieve different “headspace”. Set up the margins for the header and the main text body as though every page in the Section were to appear as your second page. Choose “This Section Has Different First Page” in the Header/Footer Palette. Now go to the header for the first page, enter the text, keep the cursor within that text, then alter Line Spacing in the Paragraph Palette. The settings could form the basis for a Style.

The only problem is separation of the header from the main text body. But this is a problem for all the pages, not just the first. This is where one needs a paragraph return, at the end of the header text, in both types of headings, as all the available mechanisms for subsequent spacing adjustment require one. With the cursor positioned after this paragraph return, adjustment of line spacing can produce the desired separation. One could create a Style for this (empty) paragraph and make it the Next Style in the Style for the actual header text.

Actually, no I did not do that. I have used soft returns for valid reasons in other pats of my doc but not this header. What you are seeing is a soft return on the TITLE that should be below the header. I use a soft return there so the TOC shows the entire title but yet I get the design I want. Is this a problem?

I assumed you were putting the chapter number and title in the page Header, not below it. The former would be the normal arrangement.

With them inside the Header, regardless of the number of lines (be they separated by soft or hard returns), place a hard return at the end, position the cursor in the now concluding paragraph and then adjust the line spacing.

If you wish the chapter number and title to be below the Header (and hence in the main text body), just create a Style for that paragraph. This would not be a satisfactory arrangement for pages beyond the first, as the position of those details could be affected by text alterations on previous pages (unless you incorporated hard page breaks).

Thanks. Yes, there is a hard return after the "3D Printing Strategies" in the header (it is in the header).

I had not considered putting the chapter number and title in the header. Is this really common practice? I've not seen that on any of the publishing tips sites I've read. Will content in the Header be picked up in a TOC?

It’s actually a very long time since I’ve needed to create a Table of Contents for a long document. But I now see that you can’t reference Header text in a TOC. On the one hand, this is quite reasonable when you consider that a Header can be repeated. On the other hand, it could be argued that the program design should accommodate such an arrangement, by allowing Header content to be marked for TOC inclusion, but with the TOC only referring to the first instance of that Header. One way of achieving this would be to permit text in the Header of the first page of a Section to be incorporated in a TOC. I imagine a macro could handle this.

Be that as it may, you could still use the technique I described to effect your different spacing. It’s just that the chapter title on the first page of a chapter will need to be positioned in the main text body beneath the (largely blank) Header. On subsequent pages the title can go in the Header.

I had not considered putting the chapter number and title in the header. Is this really common practice? I've not seen that on any of the publishing tips sites I've read. Will content in the Header be picked up in a TOC?

I totally disagree with adryan on the idea of putting a chapter title inside a header, even a non-repeating one. That completely violates the logic of documents. Headers are for information that runs "alongside" the document.

Of course you may want to also put the chapter heading inside the header as well to create a "running header". This can be done with a cross-reference that copies the text. But of course you could also just retype it.

As to why the heading overlaps the header, this should not happen (unless it's a floating text box). It's possible that Nisus momentarily did not update the text layout, which might happen especially on long complex documents with with many elements that affect text layout. Whenever such things happen I would recommend saving the file and then closing and reopening.

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